Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Staunton, November 30 – One of the
most important and influential books about the Soviet leadership was Nathan
Leites’ The Operational Code of the Politburo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951; available
via hypertext link at rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB104-1.html).

His study traced the ideas that
drove the leadership of the Soviet Union to take this or that action and was
based on a careful study of what those leaders had said and done in particular
cases, something that Leites generalized to provide guidance as to what the
Soviet ruling elite would be likely to do in the future.

Now, the Snob portal has examined “hundreds”
of statements by members of the Putin elite and compiled what it calls “the
moral compass of the Russian bureaucrat” of today. It has now presented its
findings with only the caveat that there is as yet no unanimity in views on any
of these points (snob.ru/selected/entry/117280).

In each case, the portal provides
hypertext-linked quotations from Vladimir Putin as well as key members of the
government and federal legislature.Some
of the findings are unexpected, but many are disturbing. And while they do not
provide the kind of authoritative guidance that Leites’ work did, they are
suggestive.

Snob’s 14 points of the values
system of Russian officialdom at the present time are as follows:

Staunton, November 30 – Aleksey
Shaburov, the editor of the Politsovet portal, says that the Kremlin plans to
redraw the borders of the regions and republics of Russia after 2018 but argues
that if it does so without changing the political system as a whole, that
process risks making the country’s economic and even political situation much
worse.

Shaburov, who says that he favors
the redrawing of many of the existing borders within the country because doing
so is “that rare case when the authorities are moving in the right direction,
but there is a great risk that they as is their custom will end by doing the
wrong thing” (politsovet.ru/53826-ukrupnenie-regionov-kak-luchshe-ili-kak-vsegda.html).

The regional division of the country
clearly needs updating, he argues. “The Russian Federation inherited an
administrative-territorial division from Soviet times and did not rethink or
replace it.” Much of that system was the product of official “arbitrariness”
and cannot be justified now.

“In the planned Soviet system,”
Shaburov says, the division into republics and regions “could exist, but in the
current federal one, when each region has its own taxes and budgets, the
economic harm of this system is becoming ever more obvious.”

The regions and republics need to be
combined, he continues, but “everyone understands” that poor regions will not
become rich unless their borders are changed. And people also understand that
while the regions are formally equal, they are in fact anything but – and this situation
is further exacerbated by the existence of republics.

“If from a legal point of view,
Sverdlovsk oblast is in no way different from let us say Chechnya, then from
the point of view of the functioning of political institutions, there is
between them an enormous gap, one that is in no way reflected in the legal acts”
of the Russian Federation.

But making any changes in borders or
status will be difficult, Shaburov says, because this requires “a serious,
broad and general” discussion of all interested parties. But “alas, in
contemporary Russian politics, there are no mechanisms for such a discussion”
and so it is unlikely to take place.

Instead, the Kremlin will make the
decision and impose it on the country, and any public discussion will be only “an
imitation” of something real.That
probably doesn’t matter for many issues, but it clearly does matter and matters
profoundly for any change in borders or the status of regions and republics.

The greatest obstacle to a serious
discussion of these things is that “the theme of interethnic and inter-regional
relations in the Russian Federation are subject to a multiplicity of taboos.”Federal law in fact “prohibits the discussion
of the territorial composition of the state and de facto bans criticism and casting doubt on certain aspects of
ethnic policy.”

Under those conditions, regional
leaders and most others concerned with this issue will be afraid to say
anything, and that means that “in the discussion of the amalgamation of
regions, the leading role inevitably will remain with the federal center which
has its own interests which do not correspond with the interests of the regions.”

·First,
“there is the risk that the model of enlarging regions will simply be imposed
by order, and this will be even worse than if nothing were changed.”

·Second,
“the new model if it appears could lead to the further political centralization”
of the state with more unitarism and less federalism.

·Third,
“there is the risk that from the economic point of view, the regions as a
result of amalgamation will lose more than they gain,” especially if tax and
budgetary arrangements remain as they are now, arrangements than benefit Moscow
but not the regions.

·And
fourth, “there is a great chance” that Moscow could seriously destabilize the
country if it decides to do away with the national republics without consulting
with their populations.

In short,
Shaburov argues, “the reform of regional arrangements cannot occur separately
from reforms of the remaining parts of the political system” because “if it is
carried out within the framework of the current political configuration, there
is every chance that things will only become worse.”

Staunton, November 30 – As Russians
and others approach the 25th anniversary of the Beloveshchaya
accords, many of them are certain to say that that agreement between the
presidents of the RSFSR, Ukraine and Belarus was the death knell for the USSR.
But in fact, Vadim Shtepa says, they didn’t “destroy” it because it had long
since ceased to exist.

The Russian, Ukrainian and
Belarusian leaders viewed this as just another effort by Gorbachev to hold on
to power, and they wanted to eliminate that chance by eliminating his
position.The Soviet president failed in
his efforts because “by virtue of his policy in 1991, he fell between Scylla
and Charybdis, between two fires.”

That is because, the regionalist
says, Gorbachev’s “previous project of a union of sovereign states as a federation, which was being prepared
for signature on August 20, was blocked by the putsch,” while his November
project for “the Union as a
confederation was cancelled by those who defeated the putschists.”

“The distinction between the
pre-August and the post-August projects of a new Union treaty,” Shtepa
continues, “consisted in the fact that the first anticipated a more centralized
system which gave critics the basis of calling it ‘a remake of the USSR.’” But
one aspect of it was especially threatening to the then-powers that be.

The pre-August version declared that
“all union posts must be occupied by persons delegated by the republics and not
by the former Soviet nomenklatura.” That change, Shtepa says, “can be
considered the ‘cadres’ cause of the putsch.”

The post-August variant, in
contrast, reduced the central powers to “an absolute minimum,” and although the
document didn’t include the term “subsidiarity,” that was what Gorbachev and
those who helped him prepare the document clearly were talking about. Indeed,
what that document would have put in place would have been something very like
the EU.

Moreover, Shtepa points out, “it is
interesting to note that in the draft of this Treaty was a direct citation to
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and a requirement that its
signatories bring their legislation into line with the principles of that
document. That sets it apart from both the CIS Treaty and the Russian Federal
Treaty of 1992, neither of which mention it.

The CIS, he continues, “initially
was conceived as a coordinating institution like the European Union, but in
fact it turned out to be that only formally and could not prevent any conflicts
among the countries of the post-Soviet space or ensure that all its members
would follow democratic and legal norms.

Subsequent efforts to build “over
the CIS” via structures like “the Eurasian Union” did not have any real
results, “but only were evidence that a genuine post-imperial transformation of
the post-Soviet space had not occurred.”And that means that up to now, “there has not arisen any common mutually
interested project for the future” given that “the actual ‘Russian-centricity’
of this space makes the role of other countries secondary and subordinate.”

That doesn’t mean that the
post-Soviet countries won’t cooperate in various ways: they are fated by
geography and history to do so, he says. The issue is “only about the model of
this cooperation and whether it is based on direct ties and possibilities which
a confederation gives or on the subordination to some archaic imperial
stereotypes.”

Unlike other post-Soviet states
which “began to construct new states, in part build on the experience of their independence
after 1917, Russia turned to its pre-revolutionary imperial history and
considered itself the direct successor of that.” But such a view gave rise to
thinking in categories of “the metropolitan center” and “the colonies” and made
real progress impossible.

“This was the historical paradox of
December 1991,” Shtepa argues. It seemed to many at the time that “Russia was
freeing itself from the Soviet past, but this ‘liberation’ led only to its
emersion in a still more distant past, with two-headed eagles, a government
role for the church, colonial wars and so on.”

Had the republics agreed to a
confederal arrangement, such a restoration of imperial thinking in Rusisa “would
have been impossible in principle.” Russia and its neighbors would have been “forced
to observe common legal norms as they are observed by EU countries, and the
wars with Georgia and Ukraine” would have been unthinkable.

And had that happened, it is likely
that “confederal thinking” would have spread across Russia, “significantly
raising the role of regional and local self-government” and eliminating the
drive for the reconstitution of any power vertical.

Obviously, that didn’t happen, and
it appears to be true that “Russian political thought of those years was still
not ready for the format of a confederation.” But ideas like this one can
spread quickly, Shtepa concludes, noting that in 1989, Soviet police arrested
someone for carrying the Russian tricolor, but two years later, that flag had
become the official one of Russia.